Barry Lyndon was the Stanley Kubrick film shot partly using candlelight for its period interiors.
Kubrick wanted the film’s eighteenth-century scenes to look as if they had been lit naturally. To achieve this, cinematographer John Alcott used specially modified cameras fitted with extremely fast Zeiss lenses originally developed for low-light photography. The production could therefore film scenes illuminated mainly by candles, producing the soft, shallow-focus appearance associated with Barry Lyndon.
The film follows the rise and decline of an Irish adventurer in eighteenth-century Europe. Its visual style was influenced by the paintings of the period, especially the compositions and lighting of artists such as William Hogarth and Thomas Gainsborough. The candlelit scenes are not the only source of illumination in the movie, but they are its most famous technical achievement.
Barry Lyndon was released in 1975 and won four Academy Awards, including Best Cinematography for Alcott. The candlelight technique is often confused with simple historical recreation, but it required specialized lenses and careful exposure rather than ordinary candlelit photography.